Ala Alaazeh is an Assistant Professor of cultural anthropology at Birzeit University’s  Department Of Social And Behavioral Science, whose research in memory studies focuses on Palestinian memory and the examination of questions such as history, nostalgia, and hegemony. In this episode, Noura Salah Al-Deen spoke with Professor Alaazeh about the production of knowledge in general, and the memory studies in Palestine as a particular site of knowledge-formation. She discussed with him what it means for Palestine to be a site of knowledge from which we draw research methods, and specifically about the mechanisms and positions through which Palestinian memory can be thought of as a critique of the dominant and the hegemonic, not only on the local oder but the global as well. The conversation raised questions about the relationship of memory and remembrance to history, memorialization and memory-making, the Palestinian Authority, Palestinian violence and nonviolence, the present and the future as makers of the past, hope, nostalgia, the efforts of rereading the first Palestinian Intifada as a hegemmonic process faced by counter-hegemnoic processes, and the imagination of future.

References

Sayigh, Rosemary. 1979. Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries. A People’s History. London: Zed Press.

Sayigh, Rosemary. 1995. Palestinians in Lebanon: Harsh Present, Uncertain Future. Journal for Palestine Studies, Vol. 25, pp. 37–53.

Swedenburg, Ted. 1991. "Popular memory and the Palestinian national past." In Golden Ages, Dark Ages: Imagining the Past in History and Anthropology, ed. J O’Brien,WRoseberry, pp. 152–79. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Swedenburg, Ted. 1995. Memories of the Revolt: the 1936–1939 Rebellion and the Palestinian National Past. Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press.

Photo Courtesy: Edited image taken from a publication by the Institute for Palestine Studies

Music: Oya Marhaba, by TootArd